In Culture
- This is the state bird of Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas.
- It features in the title and central metaphor of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. In that novel, mockingbirds are portrayed as innocent and generous, and two of the major characters, Atticus Finch and Miss Maudie, say it is a sin to kill a mockingbird because "they don't do one thing for us but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us".
- The traditional American lullaby "Hush Little Baby" has been recorded in numerous musical styles. The lyrics refer to Northern Mockingbirds once being popular as pets, and begin:
- Hush little baby, don't say a word,
- Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird.
- And if that mockingbird don't sing,
- Mama's gonna buy you a diamond ring.
- "Listen to the Mocking Bird" is a classic American folk song.
- President Thomas Jefferson had a pet mockingbird named Dick.
Read more about this topic: Northern Mockingbird
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“The local is a shabby thing. There’s nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)